Lord-Inquisitor Brüsà Intaglio

The scent of remnant bile stained my nose, my gaze dancing between the young Spellswords who had broken from their spars to watch me with curiosity. They spoke words I couldn’t make out as the messy fog of grief washed over my mind, their urges and pleas for my attention glancing off my wits as visions danced and my focus faded. The handful of fellow Inquisitors beside me worked to prop me up, they were bemused by my state but gave a precious few seconds of respite as they held my falling body. They spoke to me, but I could not make out their words.

What is this pain of grief? I had lost many men in my life, my father nowhere near the first. Oft absent and far too willing to dispatch me to tarry amongst the simple folk.

But he was the reason I survived, he was the one who saved me, like I to my own son when Giam Alghieri had declared his intentions all those years ago. To be told of his demise so plainly, with no ceremony or care and dispensed alongside orders to send young men to die. This was a True Crisis, this so-called Occult Crisis. I had yet bore witness to this grievous occult, the ones the Cacciare swore to purge and the ones whose influence rots as far as Saradga and as deep as the mountains due north.

We went about our task as intended, the lot of us picking from the youth those most eager and studied in the art of death and sorcery, as few as they may be now that the eldest of the classes has been dispatched before our arrival. Of the near 600 who attend the academy of Provvidenza, we parted with a paltry gathering of less than two dozen, routine adepts with a grasp of flame like most of the Ascadian lot, though perhaps it would be best to curry favor with the mountain states to seek their masters of momentum and force.

So many thoughts plagued my mind, that same sense of detachment hung overhead. By the time we had mustered our youths I had yet to shake the twisting of sights and sounds that skittered about my perception, or the rigors of my body that gave way to sweats and shivers. I was lucky to have a horse in these times, as were the youths who followed along. Their positions as “Erellum”, masters of the small batches of fighting men, had earned them that. The dire straits of our armies hadn’t left us strapped for the means to equip them, rather the font of bodies began to run dry, and the farms were tended by displaced western migrants rather than the Corbaglian kin who toiled there in my youth. The vineyards still ran green with endless tendrils of grasping vines regardless of who worked them, that much calmed my mind.

Militias are plentiful, and the swelling numbers of migrants from the far provinces provide ample bodies to stock them. Our tragedy was that of sorcery, bladesmen who work in spell and steel. That was why we mustered youths, the academies produce them in great numbers while the rural orders bring about a precious few.

“This rot your father speaks of is pervasive and deep, Vittorio, it climbs cliffs and traverses valleys and has no regard for what we consider borders. The Cacciare exist to hunt rot, not bandy words with its purveyors.”

Herus Cecco Fania of the Legio Cacciare to Vittorio Intaglio, heir apparent of the title of Lord-Inquisitor